[Ham] Nothingness cannot create anything, and I never said it did. As to how I can "make nothing into something...while maintaining a delusion that it is not" is a paradox only you can explain.
[Krimel] I didn't say you saiod that 'nothingness' creates anything; although your whole exposition on negation of nothingness sounds suspiciously like it. It is not my business to explain the paradoxes and delusions that you create for yourself. > [Krimel] > Space even empty space is something. Nothing on the > other hand is nothing. It is inconceivable. It is who and > where you were before you were born. [Ham] That it is inconceivable does not mean that it isn't true. [Krimel] That is just too big a target... You can say whatever you want but when your central concepts like time and nothingness are so out of touch, the rest of what you say become senseless. Still, this does help to explain why your statements about the Big Bang are so laughably quaint. > [Krimel] > Even if one were to grant the validity of being and nothingness > as a duality, all one could ever speak of is the being part. > About 'nothing' nothing can be said. At all, period. To then > jump from being to awareness of being, Ham must take a huge > quantum leap. Who says that being requires awareness? > Descartes would say that awareness presumes being but that > is a different matter. [Ham] I don't disagree with this analysis. But even evolutionists regard awareness as having jumped from being to awareness of being. And if Descartes was right that awareness presumes being, and Pirsig is right that experience defines being, then I'm not taking this quantum leap alone. Inasmuch as empirical evidence is experiential, there is no evidence that things exist in the absence of their being experienced. [Krimel] Evolution holds that awareness emerged through a series of very small steps over an enormous period of time. Despite the flaws in his overall conception of evolution, Pirsig basically accepts this as well. Descartes was laboring under the same burden of theologically based thinking that bogged down the medieval theologians you admire and emulate. [Ham] Again, I have no disagreement with the MoQ as you have qualified it. We do make ourselves part of the reality we construct by becoming aware. But I don't think this is what Pirsig means when he writes about accessing the Intellect. [Krimel] Well at least we agree on something but I think the problems with regards to intellect arise less from what Pirsig wrote that what he did not write about it. [Ham] It is a fallacy to regard intellect as indigenous to a culture rather than to the individual. Researching information from a library or on the Internet may be a random search, but it is not accessing Intellect. Intellection is what one does to draw conclusions from the researched data. [Krimel] Individuals do not just make up their world views out of whole cloth they absorb and integrate it from the environment around them. A major part the human environment is culture. There is a difference between thinking and what you can think about. The storage of thoughts in oral, written and digital code is what allows the individual access to vast stores of accumulated information and wisdom. It provides us not only with knowledge but knowledge of intellectual tools to process that knowledge. Far from reducing the power and importance of "the individual" this magnifies and expands it. > [Krimel > Randomness is another story. Pirsig concludes that a MoQ > would be an MoR but he turns away from it. Someone could > compile an impressive list of philosophers who have pointed at > randomness or chaos and turned away. They bring an > argument to the brink of it and then head in another direction > because obviously we can't go there. [Ham] Why can't we go there? Evidently you already have, or at least think we should go there. Personally, I don't see the point of metaphysical randomness. It doesn't qualify as a primary source any more than does an orderly universe. I view order as the intellect's "contribution" to raw experience. It seeks a rationale for diversity, is attracted to symmetry, harmony and logical coherence, and constructs a perspective based on these principles. Of course, I also believe that the properties and arrangement of phenomena are derived from the Value that connects man to his essential source. [Krimel] Many have gone there. Probably theory is well established in mathematics and is essential to modern conceptions of physics and biology. It is a source of change and variation in every field of study. No one escapes it and everyone, either consciously or instinctively understands and responds to it at some level. It is fabled in story and song throughout the ages and most religions begin with an account of the triumph of order over chaos. For most religions life is an ongoing battle between then. One of "intellect's" main functions is pattern recognition. In information theory patterns specifically serve to reduce uncertainty. Meaning in fact equates to reduction of uncertainty. The ability to reduce uncertainty and make increasing accurate models of the future immensely improves the odds of reproductive success. What we Value most is stability and reduced uncertainty. The appreciation for randomness is deep within us but until fairly recently we have not had the intellectual tools the deal with it. [Ham] Essentialism may allay the "horror of chaos and uncertainty" but fear is not what drives it. The concept of Essence as the ultimate reality was inspired by gnostic philosophers and logicians who understood that relational existence does not spring from nothingness but is only the differentiated image (negation, reduction) of an absolute source. The precept that we are all linked to this source by Value offers a teleology for existence and gives meaning to the life experience. [Krimel] Who are these "gnostic philosophers and logicians." The Gnostics were driven out of Christianity before the Council of Nicaea. Before the discovery of buried libraries in the 1940s all that was known about them came from their enemies' writings. There seems to have been several obscure groups of medieval Gnostics but what makes them Gnostic? Cusa was a cardinal who was influenced by Copernicus during the time before Galileo gave Copernicus a bad name with the pope. So while he was a cardinal he had a bit more latitude in the heresy department that later writers. I have never heard you give a specific reference to Cusa's writings. What exactly did he say and where is it found. Other than Eckhart, the mystic, who are these guys? And why should anyone today take medieval metaphysics seriously? > [Krimel] > Bo, be sure and pass all this along to Ham, will you? > Oh yeah and tell him I laughed out loud to see that he put > that hate filled essay on his "Values" pages. > Values, what a laugh. [Ham] Then again, some people don't recognize value when it stares them in the face. [Krimel] Then again, some people don't recognize slander of scripture, innuendo and distortion as valuable either. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
